“We’ve been working undercover here in North Africa for several years and seen none of our Muslim friends come to Jesus. Our white skin makes us an easy target for the secret police! However, countless sub-Saharan Africans working here are not attracting suspicion as we are. What if sub-Saharan Africans could reach people in our town with the Good News?”
These were our thoughts as we looked out over our desert town of 150,000 Muslims, with no known followers of Jesus. We realised that God was challenging us to return to East Africa, where we began our mission career, to mobilise the church there for mission.
Far away, in the tiny East African country of Burundi, a young man, M, felt God calling him to be a mission worker and received an invitation to our very first mission mobilising seminar in the capital. With no money to get there, he sold his precious mobile phone to buy a bus ticket.
As we presented the massive needs of the 10/40 Window and the 900-plus unreached people groups in Africa, M heard God calling him to North Africa. Too shy to speak to us, he returned home and searched online to find out about how to become a mission worker. By an amazing sequence of communications, an email from M arrived in our email box, forwarded from someone in France!
Ten years on, M has been serving in North Africa for four years, where God is greatly using him to bring Muslims to Jesus; first fruits of our new calling. Others continue the work in our North African town, while we focus on mobilising the sub-Saharan church, encouraging the formation of indigenous sending agencies, and giving cross-cultural mission training in several African nations.
Do not die till you have poured into the African church, everything that God has poured into you!
Across sub-Saharan Africa, a passion to reach the unreached is growing. For now, it may be a small trickle. The obstacles are huge and the work is hard, but there are many encouragements. We are privileged to be working with many who are passionate to see churches of the Global South seize the mission baton, which for the last two centuries has been largely in the hand of the western church.
A leader of a large pan-African evangelistic organisation once said to us, “Do not die till you have poured into the African church, everything that God has poured into you!” The Western mission movement has insight, from both its successes and failures, to pour into the growing mission movement. May the Lord of the harvest give us grace not to fail these labourers of the eleventh hour.
Give thanks for Africans who have responded to God’s call to mission, and pray for their boldness, provision and perseverance. Pray for African church leaders to look beyond their own church needs to the unreached. Pray for all those involved in mobilising and training.
P and E are associate mission workers serving in mission mobilisation in Africa.
Pray for African church leaders to look beyond their own church needs to the unreached.